Richard Allen MorrisMorris Code: Works from 1957 to 2007

Peter Blum is pleased to announce the
exhibition Richard Allen Morris: Morris
Code - Works from 1957 to 2007, opening on March 21st, 2009
at Peter Blum Chelsea, 526 West 29th Street. This will be Richard
Allen Morris first exhibition with the Peter Blum Gallery.

Richard
Allen Morris: Morris Codeis comprised of paintings
and objects from the late 1950s up to 2007.
Morris often is referred to as a “painter’s painter,” who has throughout
his career predominantly explored the potential of
painting. The self-taught Morris is based in San Diego, well off the
beaten track of the international art scene.
Nevertheless, he has always been keenly aware of the history of art as
well as contemporary movements. Working in a bookstore for the last fifty
years, gave Morris access to a variety of art magazines, which he studied and
collected obsessively. His incisive observational skills allowed him to adopt many
different styles throughout his career, pushing his
work to the limits of the tension between object and relief as well as
playfully teasing the border between representation and abstraction. Morris’
work is anchored in a restless engagement with Abstract Expressionism,
something he often translates into a more accessible Pop format. These
distinctive qualities have made his close friend, John Baldessari, who Morris
met in the 1950s, an important advocate of his work.

In the 1960s Morris produced a series
of caricature-like close-ups of heads as well as 3-dimensional gun objects. For
these guns, which he continued creating through the 1990s, Morris assembles
materials that are readily available (cardboard, wood, old paint tubes, recycled canvas)
into poignant visual commentaries of our time. Around 1974 his paintings became
increasingly abstract and focused on small formats, often using leftover wood
as a painting support. In these different series,
Morris squeezed paint straight out of the tube onto the canvas, applied thick
paint with a palette knife onto long slats of wood, or reused old cut-up
paintings to create colorful new collages.

Little known outside of
California, Morris has received serious attention in Europe with a major
exhibition at Museum
Haus Lange, Krefeld Germany in 2004 and currently at the Daros Collection in
Zürich. Morris had numerous gallery shows in Cologne, Zürich and Paris.

Richard Allen Morris was born in
1933 in Long Beach, CA and currently lives and works in San Diego. His first
solo exhibition was in 1960 at the Art Center in La Jolla, La Jolla, CA.. From
the 1960s to early 2000s he was predominantly shown in the San Diego area.
Morris had his New York solo debut in 2004 at the CUE Art Foundation. In 2005,
the above-mentioned exhibition at the Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld traveled to
the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art. In recent years, Morris’ work was
included in important institutional exhibitions at Kunstmuseum Bern,
Switzerland; Kunstmuseum Wiesbaden, Germany as well as at the Museum für
Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

In the front gallery, Ruben Ochoa will present the sculpture "three the hard way", which concurs with his major site-specific installation Collapsed at Peter Blum Soho (99 Wooster Street, from March 19th to May 9th - now extended through July).